Thailand Summer 2008

Sunrise on the top of a mountain

A monk teaching one of my students

Our storage shed building project

Me and the head of the village at Baan Mai

Karen Woman

I am currently driving back to Chiang Mai from Chiang Rai after dropping off my students at the airport. My Come With Nothing trip is now over and I have to start a new trip. These last 3 weeks have been so much fun. Some of the most memorable weeks of my life. It feels so weird to leave this group that had become so close because of the experiences that we had together. I feel so lucky to have been able to lead these amazing high school students through the beautiful and cultural rich areas of Northern Thailand. We got to experience parts of Thailand that foreigners never get to see. By going to these places, we learned so much about respect for culture and what irresponsible tourism can do to places. All of us leave this trip more aware of our actions as we travel around the world. We have also learned so much from each other as we all come from different places and very different backgrounds.

So, we started off the trip with some great times. The second night of our trip happened to be the 4th of July, so we had a big party at our house in Chiang Mai which included lots of big fireworks. Obviously, this did not go over so well with the neighbors and the party ended early when the police showed up. What a great start to the trip though. We also started off the trip with establishing leaders of the day and assigning leader of the day duties. They were to change everyday and leaders of the day were responsible for coming up with thoughts of the day, which would be discussed every night over dinner. This turned out to be one of the best parts of our trips. The students were excited to get into really deep cultural issues and the discussions always lasted well past dinner. Our minds were definitely stretched by the discussions we had and these thoughts caused us to really keep our eyes open and observe what was going on around us where ever we happened to be.

After this, we headed to our first village about an hour south of Chiang Mai. It is a Karen village called Baan Mai outside of the town of Hot. This is a special village to us because our local staff on the trip was from this village. Having him back in his home village allowed us privileges that we could not experience elsewhere. To get to this village, we had to hire 3 4Wheel Drive trucks to get us up the 45 minute long dirt road to the village. This drive is spectacular. It goes up a very narrow canyon with huge mountains and cliffs all around. It has a mountain that looks like half of it just fell off, so there are amazing cliffs all the way up. It reminds me of Half Dome in Yosemite, and I even call this place the Yosemite Valley of Thailand. Several mornings in this village, we did sunrise mountain climbs to take in the amazing scenery of this place. Standing on top of these mountains, watching the sunrise and looking down at the valley floor covered in rice patties such an amazing way to start the day. The people in this village are equally as beautiful as the nature that surrounds them,. Through my time in Thailand this year, I have spent a lot of time with Karen people and really grown to love them. They are friendly, peaceful, easy going and fun. I cherish any opportunities I have to spend time in Karen villages. At this village, I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with my house parents and other villagers talking and eating great food. These nights, sitting around the cooking fire in the kitchen are some of my best memories of the whole trip. As for the project at this village, we continued working on a storage building that had been started by the previous group. The village need a community storage building to store stuff that the government gives them that they don’t need all the time. They also need it to store corn and rice after the harvest. When we got there, the posts and roof were already up, so we had to pour a concrete floor and building walls out of concrete blocks. We had to do all of this in 3 days and not spend more than $250. The project went well, and we had some great times working with the locals on this project. Many of the men of the village helped out with the work and it was an interesting time trying to get them and the students to work together. It all turned out fine though and we finished what we set out to. It was really interesting to learn about building practices in the hill tribes for me. Everything is so simple. We needed stones and sand to mix with the cement, so we headed down to the river to gather it. We needed a frame in the floor to make the concrete stronger, so we chopped down some bamboo, cut it up and wove it together into a strong grid frame. I wish that construction could be so simple back in the US. No building codes to worry about here. Another great aspect of this village was our time with the local monk. This village happened to be Buddhist and the monk that resides at the local temple is one of the most amazing people I have ever met. We spent a lot of time with this monk, learning how to meditate and listening to him teach about how we can change the world into a better place for everyone through learning about ourselves and serving others. He is a very wise man and has a great sense of humor as well. I never saw him without a smile on his face. One day, we got to help him with planting trees on a hillside where all the trees had been cleared. This was a great opportunity for us because when talking to the head of the village, he said if he could have anything in the world, He would want the forests around his village to be replanted. I am so happy that we were able to help him accomplish his dream. Each of us planted on tree. The monk and I were also able to have some religious conversations about Christianity and Buddhism. He was very accepting of my religion and so happy that people of different religions could work together to make this world a better place. It is so nice to meet people in this world are willing to work with people who may be different than them. It was so nice to work closely with someone who was very religious but at the same time accepting of people with other religious beliefs. I wish that more people could be this way. We are all working towards the same goal and we can accomplish it so much faster if we all work together. My friendship with this monk was very encouraging for me and I will always remember him and the conversations that we had. Many of the students also became close with this monk. The last night in this village was an especially good time, the villagers threw us a party and had a string ceremony for us. The string ceremony consists of the villages tying white string on our wrist and send blessings of good luck into the string. The strings must then not be removed until they fall off. They will offer protection and good luck for as long as they are on your wrist. We also had a bonfire and lots of tradition singing and music. It was such a great way to end our time in the first village.

After the first village, we had a great break time. Right after leaving the village, we drove to a grove of pine trees at the top of a mountain and had a picnic in the cool air. The environment there reminded us all of America and we had such a relaxing picnic and nap there. It was just what we all need after a week in the village. We also brought out the speakers and iPods for this after not having them in the village. This made it so much better. That night we spent the night at the orphanage and had a great discussion about the situation in Burma. This was great after having just spent time in a Karen village and then learning about how bad the Karen people are being treated just across the border in Burma. The next day, we drove to Mae Hong Son and rode elephants. We stayed in a guesthouse here and prepared to go to our next village. Most groups go see the Karen longneck village here as well. These are the people that stretch out their necks by putting brass rings on. We decided as a group not to go through. This village is extremely touristy and I would compare it more to a zoo for human beings. Not really the kind of place I want to be supporting by paying lots of money to o there. It is such a tourist trap and a great example of how tourism can ruin a place and its culture. It makes me sad every time I have to go there. Before going into our second village, we also spent an evening in Pai shopping and eating western food. Pai is the hippie town of northern Thailand. It is filled with foreigners and has a huge hippie vibe to it. It is like putting a Colorado mountain town right in the middle of Thailand. It is a great place and the students love going here. It is a beautiful place and a relaxing town to spend an evening in.

To be continued…………

written by

jasonreevesmiller on July 27, 2008 from Chiang Mai, Thailand

from the travel blog: Thailand Summer 2008

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No pictures of this yet, but a nice trip slideshow will be up on the web soon. I will send the link when it is avaliable.

At the last second possible, I was told to head up towards Mae Hong Son to survey a route for a new program. Mae Hong Son is the province that is in the far Northwestern part of Thailand and borders Burma. It is a very mountainous, remote, and diverse area of Thailand, and because of all of this, it is my favorite part of Thailand. The plan, heading out of Mae Hong Son city was to hike over 100 miles to the south to the city of Mae Sariang. We needed to blaze a trail that stayed away from the main roads where elephants could trek next year. Other than that, we had no plan, nowhere to stay, no map, and no trail to follow. This is not like hoping onto the Appalachian Trail with your backpack, tent and a clear trail to follow. We were heading deep into the jungle through hilltribe villages and asking locals to guide us on to the next place. For the first part of the trip, we did have a support truck to carry our stuff and to help plan a path, but that soon went by the wayside as the path got more remote and inaccessible. On the trip, I was accompanied by Maggie (a photographer for Rustic), Bay (a local Ahka ethic guy), Nueng (a local Karen ethnic guy), and Pa (a 50 year old Karen guy that will head up the leading of this trek next year). This trip proved to be very challenging and a great insight to life in past times when people always traveled in this way.

On the first day, we started off pretty late because we were trying to buy supplies and plan a little for the trip. Because of this late start, we ended up riding in the truck for a bit this day and didn’t actually hike that much. It worked out really good though, because there was a beautiful 4WD road that led through many Karen villages. We stopped by every village and saw some really amazing places not far from the border with Burma. That night, we were also able to stay in the house of a really nice Northern Thai family and find our guide for the next day. At this point, we still were not clear on the exact plan because of communication issues and were quite frustrated. We spent a lot of time talking this night and worked out more of a plan. Unfortunately, working with Thai people never goes smooth. They tell you they are going to do one thing, and then will turn around and do something completely different. This made the first few days of the journey frustrating and tiring. We always had to fight to get the people to understand what kind of terrain we wanted to hike through and what kind of places we wanted to spend the night. Civilization was much too close in the first half of the trip and we just couldn’t get it in the guy’s head that was planning for us what we wanted to do. The next few days were long hiking days, spending a lot of time walking through rivers. The rivers were amazingly beautiful and clear. Going by river also allowed us to see many insights into mountains culture. We met people fishing, building dams for irrigation, and washing clothes. We drank fresh made jungle tea and told the locals about our crazy adventure. We would always end up right near the main roads, just taking shortcuts though the jungle to do this. The made it easy for us though. The truck carried all the food and water and provided great support for the trip. Even though all this was great, it wasn’t really the kind of trip we were trying to plan….

Three days into hiking, we got in after a very long day of hiking into a village right along the main road. Here, we stayed in a really small hut with an old man who said he would be our guide for the next three days into Mae Sariang. This guy was 68 years old, but seemed strong and said he knew the path well. The next morning, we took off for our next village after waiting for our guide for over an hour. The day was already not going well. As we continued down the path, the guide would continually stop to smoke a cigarette and complain that his legs were hurting. It was a slow pace and we were all getting frustrated. Then, the guide started to get lost. We wandered around this valley for hours in circles trying to find the path through the mountains to the next village. Late in the afternoon, we finally made it into the village where we were going to spend the night. We were all tired and frustrated with both the guide and the truck driver. This day, we had carried all of our stuff in with us because the truck driver said he could not reach the village by truck. However, upon arriving, a truck pulled right past us into the village. This is when we decide to change all of the plans and take everything into our own hands.

The village was a really cool Karen village and we were able to buy a chicken in this village to kill and eat for dinner. Our host family was very excited to have us stay with them and happy to help us plan the rest of our trip. During this conversation, we decided to tell our old guide to go home, we hired a new one to get us to the next village and told the truck driver we didn’t need him for the next few days. The new route that we had chosen had no villages accessible by truck during this time of the rainy season. We were finally on our own and able to control our own path. Excitement was back up and we had planned a very strenuous schedule for the next 2 days. We had planned to do 40k (25 miles) the first day and 50k (30 miles) the next. The fun was just beginning.

From here, our supplies were low because we no longer had the truck. We set of with bags of rice, a jar of peanut butter and a bottle of water each that we had boiled the night before. This day started off really hard. We hiked up and over many ridges. Maggie had a bad knee a this point and it was really hard for her on the inclines. It was also very hot, muggy and the mosquitoes where swarming. On top of that, we all had leeches trying to crawl up our pants. We went through some beautiful terrain this day though and passed through many small Karen villages. About 4 hours into the hike, we popped out of the jungle and found the Thai army crawling out of trucks with big guns. They said they were out to patrol the illegal cutting of trees. At this point, we were very close to the Burmese border and it is likely that Burmese people were sneaking over to cut teak trees and take them back to Burma. Soon after this, dehydrated and tired, we stopped at a house in a small village where they let us sit, eat and boil water. Hot water is not exactly what you want to drink when you are thirsty on a hot day, but we had no other option. As the trek continued on, we had to climb over several mountain passes and then into a beautiful streambed. Due to lack of water, the stream was a welcome sight and we all drank a little water to keep us going (luckily I never got sick off of that water). Late in the afternoon, we made it to the village where we were going to spend the night right as a huge rainstorm hit. We all stood out side in the rain for a long time, washing our clothes and collecting clean rainwater to drink. That was the only time it rained on the whole trip. It was surely a gift of much needed water from the Heavens. We had a great night here as we conversed with the locals and killed another chicken for diner. We spent the evening hunting grasshoppers and talking with our guides and host family. I love to be in remote Karen villages. They have such an amazing and peaceful way of life, and they are some of the most hospitable people in the world.

The next morning, we woke up and decided to send Maggie out by motorcycle because her knee was too bad and we had a long day ahead of us. Now, it was just the boys, and we took off at an incredibly fast pace. We climbed up the mountain out of the village and followed a ridge for a long time. From here we dropped into a river and headed towards the valley. Unfortunately, today was another day filled with mosquitoes and leeches. All of our ankles were bloody from the leeches all day. A leech wound takes forever to stop bleeding. But today, we didn’t care because it was the last day and we were all determined to get to the end. We didn’t talk, stop for a break, eat lunch or even get any water. It was one solid push to the finish. Six hours later, we dropped into a teak forest and then popped out into the final valley. Here, the truck met us and we caught a ride to the final destination. We were all dehydrated and hungry, but happy to be at the end. We had a really hard but great last couple of days. Over 125 miles and 6 days of mountainous jungle finally stood behind us.

This was a great experience although really hard at times. I am glad I had the opportunity to make this journey just as people in the past did. We all felt as if we were explorers finding places for the first time. It was amazing to be a part of, but even better to finish.

written by

jasonreevesmiller on September 4, 2008 from Mae Hong Son, Thailand

from the travel blog: Thailand Summer 2008

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Thailand Summer 2008

a travel blog by jasonreevesmiller

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Week Number One

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